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I am a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis pursuing a doctorate in plant biology. I am interested in problems of how to communicate science to the public, the culture of urban living, the media, and the intersection between these topics. I like to write about these issues and life as a graduate student in St. Louis.My research is about mechanosensation in plants. That means I study how plants are able to sense and respond to the forces in the world around them. Plants are extremely sensitive to touch, gravity, even the vibrations of insects, and to the cellular forces of osmotic pressure. I work in the Haswell lab, where we study how a group of ion channels may help plants respond to all of these forces and exactly what they are doing.Because I am interested in how to communicate science to non-scientists, I take opportunities to talk about plant science around St. Louis. I have been fortunate to work with Gateway Greening, a nonprofit supporting community gardens, to give several presentations about plant biology. I am also an assistant organizer for Washington University's Science on Tap seminar series, a monthly series of talks from WUSTL professors on a wide range of topics held at the Schlafly Bottleworks. I participated in the regional FameLab competition [video] held at Washington University in 2014, and collaborated with Melanie Bauer on an essay calling for better training in science communication, for which we won third place in a National Science Foundation competition. This essay grew out of our time at the Clinton Global Initiative University conference hosted at Washington University in 2013, where I proposed an ongoing collaboration between the plant science and urban agriculture communities in St. Louis. My work with Gateway Greening is part of this commitment. I am always looking for new opportunities to practice scientific outreach.In a past life, I was a founder of the Farm Harvest Festival at my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, where I received a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in chemistry. I was also a staff writer at CWRU's student newspaper The Observer in my senior year. I can be reached by email at hamiltonerics@gmail.com or on Twitter @hamiltonerics.

Dating — online or off — is frustrating and bewildering, a long and tearful journey to a great partner. While technology has absolutely transformed how we find potential dates, the most significant change is cultural. Instead of settling down with someone “good enough” we ask so much from our partners now that it’s only natural the search for them is arduous.

Our conversations about civic matters—economic policies, schooling systems, religion, science, and social institutions—are severely lacking in nuance and reasoned debate. Instead, what flourishes are simplistic arguments and ad hominem attacks. This trend is strengthened by a media environment where we can easily consume pieces tailored to our point of view, avoiding challenge and change.

On Being is a weekly public radio show hosted by Krista Tippett ostensibly about religion and spirituality, but now the host of a broader series of discussions called the Civil Conversations Project. I used to turn off On Being when it came on my radio Sunday afternoons, put off by the wispy quality, assuming it was a liberal echo chamber of feel-good, empty spirituality.

But as I would listen in snippets, or accidentally turn it on in the car, I found it to be a series of careful, respectful dialogues about difficult subjects, with religion, of course, among the trickiest.

So it did not altogether surprise me to find myself enchanted by arecent episode on gay marriage, which really became a window into how to have civil debates. An interview of David Blankenhorn and Jonathon Rauch—originally on opposite sides of the gay marriage debate, and now friends in agreement on many issues—the discussion covered David’s changed mind on gay marriage, but much more interestingly their process of what they called “achieving disagreement.”

For this post I really want to excerpt some longer segments that, I think, speak for themselves. I encourage listening to the full episode. To have two people agree about how to disagree, that are intellectually honest in their point of view and empathetic enough to consider the other side is tragically rare these days and models a better way to converse. I think we can learn from them how to continue to passionately disagree while remaining not just polite, but truly civil.